By all accounts, Joshua Conyers should not be a Grammy-nominated opera singer and the newest assistant professor of voice at the Eastman School of Music, who gives his first Faculty Artist Series recital on Monday, September 9 at 7:30 p.m. in Kilbourn Hall.
He grew up in poverty, in the Bronx, with parents who were victims of the ‘80s crack epidemic. There were times that he was homeless and didn’t have enough food to eat. As a kid, he moved from shelter to shelter. It was hardly the type of environment that could foster a professional classical musician.
But Conyers loved to sing. “I always had this kind of capacity to want to be on stage and sing,” he says.
In summer camps in New York City shelters, he participated in talent shows. He started a boy band with three of his friends, writing their own songs and creating amateur recordings. The friends even attempted to give impromptu performances outside the homes of famous musicians and rappers near his grandmother’s Bronx home—though they never attracted the attention they hoped.
He attended high school in Virginia, where his family moved to escape angry drug dealers. Still contending with basic access to food, water, and heat, Conyers struggled in school, ending freshman year with a 1.8 grade point average. “I needed to figure out how I was going to take care of myself,” he says. “I had a lot of things to worry about as a 14-year-old kid.”
But a friend took a bus after school to attend the Government School of the Arts for music training and encouraged Conyers—who was more inclined to play sports, but whose vocal talent was undeniable—to audition too. This friend even taught Conyers a song in Italian for the audition.
Conyers got in.
“The Government School of the Arts saved me,” he says. “It put me on a path where college was an option for me. It really set me up, it gave me purpose, because I didn’t know where I was going to end up.”
Conyers credits a series of mentors for supporting him along the way, teachers who paid for meals, let him stay in their homes, and even purchased his flights and accompanied him to auditions. Those mentors helped Conyers first attend and thrive at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts as an undergraduate, and then Indiana University for graduate school.
It’s support that lifted him out of adversity and helped him launch a successful career that has included performances at several top opera companies around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the English National Opera, the Atlanta Opera, and the Seattle Opera, among others.
Conyers’s big breakthrough came when he landed a major role in Anthony Davis’s opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X as Malcom X’s brother Reginald. The opera was traveling around to various companies for two years straight, including companies in major American cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York, offering an unusual amount of job stability for an opera singer.
But he nearly turned down the role: his wife was pregnant and due right in the middle of the opera’s debut performances at the Detroit Opera. His wife insisted Conyers take the job, and their son was born in between the opera’s opening performances, with Conyers rushing to the hospital to meet his son. “I kissed him, said I love you and bye, and flew to do the next show. It all worked out.”
Although Malcolm X is a controversial figure, the opera was an opportunity to help tell the story of a Black man who faced the same racial traumas that are common to many Black Americans, as well as help clarify Malcolm X’s overall journey and promote his overriding message for equality. Conyers could identify with the early injustices Malcolm X endured, which included homelessness and poverty.
Conyers’s Faculty Artist Recital doubles as an album release concert. His first full album, A Miracle in Legacy—which was recorded in Hatch Recital Hall with Conyers’s colleague, pianist and Assistant Professor of Vocal Coaching at Eastman, Chelsea Whitaker, and the University of Rochester’s Stephen Roessner as its sound engineer—was officially released this summer and has already hit #10 on the Billboard Classical Crossover Albums charts. The album outlines his journey from poverty and abuse to becoming a performer, educator, and father.
The title track—which will also be performed as the recital’s penultimate work—is a work composed for him by Jasmine Arielle Barnes, based on original poetry by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, and its three movements tell the biographical story of Conyers’s inadequate beginnings to the discovery and development of his talents, and then his personal and professional growth.
Also pointing to Conyers’s early experiences, Carlos Simon’s song cycle American Sonnets, which deals with topics like racism, masculinity, and politics, will be heard early in the recital. Closing the first half of the concert is Shawn Okpebholo’s Two Black Churches, a two-movement dedication to the victims of two horrifying events for Black Americans: the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in 1963 and the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015.
Interspersed between these larger works will be African American spirituals by Margaret Bonds and Hall Johnson. While Conyers steered away from spirituals early in his career to avoid typecasting, he’s had a change of mind. It’s now his choice.
“I realized as I became a professional that I have a duty to make sure that these composers and their works are being done and that the things that our ancestors created need to be out there for the masses to hear.”
Joshua Conyers, baritone
Chelsea Whitaker, piano
Faculty Artist Series Recital
Monday, September 9 | 7:30 p.m. | Kilbourn Hall
Tickets are $10. Purchase tickets here.
